RESIDENCIES & OPPORTUNITIES

Exhibition Open Call 2025 & 2026

Artlink’s exhibitions support all visual art media and include both ‘emergent’ and ‘established’ artists based locally, nationally and internationally. It seeks out innovation at home, distinctive and inspiring work from further afield. The programme is curated through invited projects, those undertaken in partnership with other organisations, and those selected or developed from open submissions.

The Exhibition Open Call provides emerging and under-recognized artists the necessary resources to present an exhibition at Artlink in 2025/26. The exhibition program is open to visual artists – individuals, and collectives – working in all disciplines. Proposals should demonstrate how the artist will challenge and test their practice and how it might be relevant to this place.

The selected artists will receive valuable mentoring support from Artlink’s Creative Leadership Team, technical support and installation guidance in preparing the exhibition and exhibition, promotion and professional documentation. In addition, exhibiting artists each receive a fee of 1000 euros.

CRITERIA FOR SELECTION

• We’re looking for exceptional submissions—bring your best work!
• Artists should demonstrate a consistent arts practice outside of an academic setting for at least two years
• The proposed exhibition should be relevant to a rural, coastal context
• Priority will be given to artists who are living and working in the North West of Ireland
• All requested elements of the proposal should be included [see how to apply, below]

WHAT EXHIBITORS RECEIVE

1. Four week exhibition at Artlink in 2025 or 2026
2. Curatorial support/mentoring from Artlink Creative Leadership Team
3. Opportunities to contribute to audience engagement programme 
4. €1,000 fee 
5. Opening reception 
6. Press materials and PR support

HOW TO APPLY

There is no application form. Proposals should include the following information:

1. Images of your work – this should not exceed 6-10 images 
2. Name and contact details, phone number, including e-mail, and website if applicable
3. Biography – a brief summary of previous experience, exhibitions, commissions, publications, etc [max 200 words]
4. A brief description of what you propose to exhibit [max 500 words]
5. A brief statement outlining how this exhibition would benefit and test your practice [max 200 words]
6. Preferred dates for exhibition from the options available [see below]

A preferred way of submission is to collate all the information onto a single pdf document.

e-mail your proposal to: info@artlink.ie with the subject ‘exhibition proposal’

Please note: ensure that e-mailed images are no larger than 2MB each.

Do not send proposals by post as we do not have the capacity to return materials.

Deadline for proposals : midnight, 22nd March 2025.

Dates of the 2025 Exhibitions:

First Open Call Exhibition
Install week beginning Monday 23rd June 2025
Opening Friday 27th June 2025
Closing on 27th July
This will be part Earagail Arts Festival Programme

Second Open Call Exhibition
Install week beginning Monday 15th September
Opening Friday 19th September
Closing Sunday 19th October

2026 subject to funding: dates not confirmed, provisionally between April and September. 

Open Call
International Atlantic Art Exchange Residencies 2025

CRUX Art Inc., in collaboration with O’Brien Farm, is pleased to announce an open call for visual artists to participate in the International Atlantic Art Exchange in Newfoundland, Canada. This residency is open to visual artists currently living and working in the North West of Ireland.
Selected artists will receive a €5000 fee for a 4-week residency to take place between June and September 2025. We are particularly interested in artists who demonstrate a clear intention to create actively in the studio, as well as engage with the local community through workshops, talks, or collaborations.

This is a reciprocal residency with an artist from Newfoundland/Labrador being invited for a residency at Artlink, Fort Dunree, Ireland.

Application Deadline: Friday, 21st February 2025.

To apply:

Complete the application form available at the link below and save as a single PDF file.
Send to info@artlink.ie before Friday 21st February 2025

Open Call
Residencies 2025

Artlink’s artist residencies are open to professional Visual Artists working in any discipline including but not limited to: sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, installation, and video.
Artists in residence must be available for four weeks between April and December 2025. (This can be split into two or more visits.) During the residency artists are expected to develop new work or new ideas responding to the unique site and surrounding areas, and engage with local artists and Artlink members. Resident artists are expected to actively create within the studio space for at least 20 hours a week and be willing to hold open studio hours with the public for a minimum of one day a week. Public engagement can be through presenting artist talks, workshops, demonstrations or other events.

Fees

Artists will be paid a residency fee of €7,500/€6,000 for undertaking the residency. The residency fee covers all flights, accommodation, transport, materials, living expenses and artist’s fee. The selected artists are responsible for arranging their own accommodation and travel and managing their budget as appropriate.
There are three residency positions available. The residencies and the associated fees are allocated as follows:-

1 x Visual Artist living anywhere in the world [INTL] €7500
1 x Visual Artist living and working in Vesterålen, Norway [NO] €7500
1 x Visual Artist living and working in Ireland[IRL] €6000

The [INTL] residency is available to any artist living and working outside the Republic of Ireland, and the [IRL] Residencies are open to any artists living and working in the Republic of Ireland. The [NO] residency is available to artists living and working in Vesterålen.

To apply:

Complete the application form available at the link below and save as a single PDF file.
Send to info@artlink.ie on or before Sunday 12th January 2025.

Selection Panel

Mhairi Sutherland is a visual artist, curator, and educator exploring contemporary issues through lens-based media and drawing. She earned a PhD from TU Dublin and an MFA from the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her work in civic and public spaces began with the ‘Sitework’ public art team at Orchard Gallery, Derry, and continued with roles such as Visual Arts Officer for Glasgow City Council and Creative Director of Artlink in Donegal.

Keith Whittle is a curator, writer, and lecturer based in Tokyo, focusing on Asian art, performance art, and large-scale exhibitions. He has worked with institutions such as Film & Video Umbrella, ICA London, and White Rainbow Gallery, curating solo and group shows as well as site-specific projects at international biennials. Keith lectures on Modern and Contemporary Japanese Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Tokyo University of the Arts and is a Fellow at Central Saint Martins, UAL.

Declan Sheehan recently completed a PhD at Ulster University on early photographic practices. Based in Derry and Donegal, he has curated projects with artists such as Mat Collishaw, Amanda Coogan, and Susan Philipsz, collaborating with institutions like Void, The Ulster Museum, Artlink, and international festivals. His writing has appeared in journals and catalogues across Ireland, the UK, and beyond.

Rebecca Strain is a visual artist, writer, curator and Project Coordinator at Artlink. She refers to her works as Performative Occupations; the situation and space and the action within; occupying space and time performing a task. It applies to all aspects of her practice which is concerned with how art making can be a conduit for change.

The Artlink project The Winnowing Basket is an art trail presented in May 2025 within three parks and commons (Swan Park in Buncrana, Barrack Hill Park in Carndonagh, The Bath Green in Moville) across the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal, Ireland.

Artlink invites artists to submit existing work or propose new work for selection, for the art trail/s across one or more of these parks/commons in May 2025. Any form of work or works may be proposed: from participatory, to performance, sculpture, image-based, time-based; and proposals will also be considered for the making of works in-situ on the art trails as an open studio/residency. The Winnowing Basket is essentially an art trail and so any proposal should be suitable for installation within that format. A selected artist may make new work, and/or explore the opportunity to adapt their existing work/s in this new context.

The art trail The Winnowing Basket should act as an encounter with diverse contexts, histories and media that relate artist’s practice to the site/s and as a discrete moment for art in situ to revision and reimagine these three parks or commons.

Proposals should be received by 15th December 2024.
Email proposals to sheehan68@gmail.com and info@artlink.ie with The Winnowing Basket in the subject line.

We are pleased to announce that Danielle Macleod has been awarded the 2024 Harry Kerr Bursary. Danielle is a gifted mask maker and photographer from the Isle of Lewis, whose work is deeply intertwined with the rich cultural heritage of the Hebrides. Her photography, captured on medium format film, is known for its evocative portrayal of traditional Hebridean life, local legends, and the mystical connection between people and their landscapes.

Having spent several years in Glasgow, where she earned a BA Honours degree from the Glasgow School of Art’s Communication Design department, Danielle’s work has continually sought to reconnect her with her island home. Through her lens, the landscapes of Lewis are transformed into otherworldly realms, and its inhabitants become guardians of ancient myths and stories. Her past works, including her solo show Guardians at the Island Darkroom and two person show Na Boireannaich with Alice Macmillan, at An Lanntair, Stornoway, have been celebrated for their ability to evoke a deep sense of place and identity.

Danielle’s winning project for the Harry Kerr Bursary will delve into the traditional healing medicines and practices of the Highlands and Islands. She will create a series of portraits and landscapes, focusing on the plants and materials once used in ancient healing rituals. By crafting wearable sculptures from these natural elements and photographing them within the landscapes from which they originate, Danielle aims to create a visual dialogue that highlights the profound connection between people and their environment.

This project promises to be a compelling exploration of folk medicine, and its enduring legacy in the Highlands and Islands, offering a new perspective on the deep interdependence between the land and its inhabitants.

The Harry Kerr Bursary has been made possible by generous donor contributions. Our goal is to raise €25,000 to fund five bursaries of €5,000 per year for the next five years, providing ongoing support to deserving artists. Together, we can honour Harry and continue his mission of fostering creativity, technical skill and artistic excellence in photography. To donate to the fund click the button which will take you to the Go Fund Me page.

Neva Elliott is a Dublin-based artist and writer with an MA from Central Saint Martin’s, London. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, The National Gallery of Ireland, and The South African National Gallery. After a decade as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, Elliott returned to her art practice full-time in 2021.

Highlights from 2023 include her solo exhibition, How to create a fallstreak, at Linenhall Arts Centre, being an invited artist at the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition and showing at ARTWORKS 2023 Remembering The Future at VISUAL Carlow, where she secured an award for ‘outstanding work’.

VISUAL Carlow also commissioned an excerpt from her memoir writing, which can be read at visualcarlow.ie/art-ideas. Other writing has been featured in literary journals, art and photography publications, and as exhibition texts, including Banshee, Unapologetic Magazine, Visual Artists Newsheet and Source Photographic Review, where it earned runner-up in Source’s New Writing Prize for 2023.

Elliott is an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist.

Looking ahead, her solo exhibition, Notes on Being Human: A Year of Making, is scheduled for September
2024 at PALLAS Projects and Studios, Dublin and a two-person show at the Courthouse Gallery, Co. Clare, in 2025.

Neva Elliott creates work based on and in her life, not just narratively or anecdotally, but through extrapolating action from the awareness of the fragile and contingent nature of being human.

Projects come from a place of transparent vulnerability, saying the hard, uncomfortable things fundamental to being human. Individual works are formed through living as material, processing recollections and psychological states into action and tangible manifestation. Utilising herself as content and medium, a non- fictional performer in a lyrical conceptualism that blurs art and life.

Elliott’s recent body of work and solo show at the Linenhall Arts Centre in 2023 focused on grief centring on the artist’s loss of her husband, Colin, to cancer. Her forthcoming 2024 solo show at PALLAS will focus on post-traumatic healing and the ‘work’ everyone must do around difficult human emotions.

While on residency at Artlinks Fort Dunree, she will be working from biographical notes from the loss of her husband, whose family hails from Donegal. Creating work from and about her healing journey through lived experience – using her practice as a personal transformative process and vice versa. With works emerging as a product and communication from this experience, across textiles, ceramics, photography, text, performative action, voice, sculpture, and drawing.

While rooted in her personal biography, she aims to expand beyond individual memoir to speak to audiences honestly about aspects of our shared humanity that still hold some taboos – death, grief, and mental health.
“I use my practice to traverse the world, my relationships and the difficulties of being human. For me, it’s a means to work through grief, somewhere to place love for those who have gone, a way back to myself. It is a survival strategy baked into the act of making; an offering to my anguish and anxiety, a petition to ease it, a prayer in reverse.”

Image credit Devadeep Gupta

“As an artist navigating a multidimensional terrain, my creative exploration converges across installation, textiles, drawing, painting, film, publication, performance, and culinary arts. Rooted in collective experiences, my works serve as catalysts for dialogue, inviting reflections on contentious histories and their contemporary relevance.

My collaborative practice engages diverse communities, individuals, and institutions in India and Germany. Resulting in collective experiences shared through talks, lectures, performances, or workshops, my works aim to bridge perspectives. Through social engagements, urban and rural design interventions, expansive murals, lecture performances, and culinary sessions, I delve into narratives of resistance, disobedience, and marginalization. These narratives echo within contemporary society, serving as a lens to examine their impact on our collective existence.

This multidisciplinary journey seeks to unravel the intricate layers of human narratives, fostering connections and understanding amidst complexities, transitions, and adaptations in the face of adversity.”

The Whispering Sea

In the whispers of history and the echoes of my lineage, I find myself rooted in the narrative of migration that spans generations. Born and raised in the tranquil village of Bally, West Bengal, I am an heir to a legacy shaped by the turmoil of the Indian subcontinent’s partition in 1947. My family’s journey began in the bustling port city of Chittagong, where my grandparents, like countless others, embarked on a journey of survival and resilience.
The upheaval of partition compelled my ancestors to seek refuge, leaving behind the familiar shores of Chittagong for the uncertain embrace of Mumbai. Their tales, woven with threads of displacement and fortitude, have resonated through the passages of time, imprinting upon me a profound connection to the rhythms of migration and the cadence of the sea.

Growing up in Bally, the whispers of the Indian Ocean danced through the stories passed down by generations. The ocean, a witness to the collective memories and narratives of my family’s exodus, became an intrinsic part of myself—a silent witness to the legacy of movement and adaptation.

Now, in the context of this residency at Artlink, I yearn to forge an artistic dialogue between the Indian Ocean’s melodic history and the vast expanse of the Atlantic. This opportunity serves as a poetic juncture to weave the threads of my heritage with the broader tapestry of global migrations.

My artistic endeavour aims to illuminate the intricate parallels between the migration of waters and the human odyssey. It’s an exploration that transcends geographical boundaries, seeking to decipher whether the essence of migration resides solely within human vessels or if the oceans themselves, in their rhythmic tides and currents, carry echoes of movement and displacement.

Through the vessel of art, I endeavour to distil the essence of these migrations into tangible expressions that evoke emotions, provoke contemplation, and foster connections across oceans and histories.

Through various mediums encompassing murals, installation, multimedia and culinary practices, I aim to encapsulate the essence of migration, translating the intangible emotions into a tangible space of contemplation, courage, embracement and most importantly imagination.

In interacting with Artlink’s program, I intend to contribute actively to the local artistic community. Through open studio sessions, workshops, talks, and cooking sessions I aim to share my artistic journey and insights, fostering dialogues that intertwine the global narrative with the local tapestry.

This residency at Artlink stands as an intersection where my narrative converges with the grandeur of the oceans’ tales, and I am eager to embark on this immersive artistic journey—a testament to the resilience, love, adaptability, and endurance inherent in the human spirit amidst the currents of change, pain and hostility.